Books from Mauritius

Eve Out of Her Ruins follows four young people in Mauritius, in the neighbourhoods that visitors to the beaches and resorts rarely see. Eve treats her body as her only source of power. Savita, her closest friend, loves her without self-interest and plans to leave, though not alone. Saadiq writes poems and reads Rimbaud, and loves Eve. Clelio waits for a brother in France to call for him.

Ananda Devi tells the story through alternating voices, so the same streets appear from four angles. Fear and violence recur, and each character measures what leaving or staying would cost. Devi, who was born in Mauritius, is concerned with how a person builds a self at the edges of a society that offers little to build with, and with how loyalty and desire hold the four together.

Devi writes in French, and the book reached English-language readers in translation, with this edition marking its first British publication. In 2006 it received the Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie, a prize for novels written in French anywhere in the world. Mauritius itself lies in the Indian Ocean, with communities of Indian, African, Chinese and European descent.

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Fifteen-year-old Noemi is forced to leave school and take a domestic job in the household of the wealthy De Grandbourg family. Their home sits just across the road from the slum where she grew up, but the distance between the two worlds is vast. As Noemi navigates life inside the house, she begins to sense echoes of earlier generations of girls who occupied similar positions, and her own story starts to fold into theirs.

The novel is set in Mauritius, and its title refers to the coastal village of Riambel in the south of the island. Priya Hein uses Noemi's situation to trace patterns of class and ethnicity that have shaped Mauritian life across generations. The book carries a second, broader thread running alongside Noemi's account: a history of women on the island who resisted, teachers who pushed their poorest students to question established stories, and a society often marketed as paradise but marked by deep structural divides.

Hein frames these tensions through the perspective of a teenager whose options have been narrowed by circumstances she did not create. The narrative connects domestic service, ancestry, and the slow reshaping of social order on a small island nation.

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In the 1950s on the island of Mauritius, a boy named Vishnu Bhushan grows up in a family shaped by the legacy of Indian indentured labor. His mother describes the family as an alliance of two bankrupt households, and as Vishnu gets older he begins to piece together the fractured histories behind that description. The novel follows roughly the first two decades of his life, tracing his attempts to understand both his origins and the wider world beyond his immediate surroundings.

Mauritius during this period was still a British colony, moving toward the independence it would gain in 1968. The story sits inside that transition, where cultural expectations, political shifts, and family obligations press against Vishnu's desire for something larger. Vinod Busjeet writes with close attention to the tensions between loyalty and ambition, between staying rooted in a community built by indentured laborers and reaching for opportunities elsewhere.

The novel draws on the particular history of Mauritius as a place where Indian workers were brought to sugar plantations after the abolition of slavery. That history gives the story its specific texture, connecting personal struggles over education, identity, and family duty to a broader pattern of displacement and adaptation across generations.

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Selina Periampillai grew up in London with family roots in Mauritius, and this cookbook draws on home cooking from several Indian Ocean island groups. Recipes come from Mauritius, the Seychelles, the Maldives, Mayotte, and Madagascar, each contributing its own ingredients and methods. Around 80 dishes range from quick weeknight meals to larger gatherings, reflecting kitchens where African, South Asian, East Asian, and European influences overlap.

The focus is accessible home cooking rather than restaurant technique. Dishes include sticky chicken with garlic and ginger, mustard- and turmeric-marinated tuna, a Seychellois aubergine and chickpea cari, and pineapple upside-down cake with cardamom cream. The range moves between fish from island coasts, spice-led vegetable preparations, and desserts shaped by tropical fruit and warm spices. Rum appears too, in recipes meant for social cooking.

Photography and illustrations accompany the recipes, which move through market stalls, spice gardens, fishing coasts, lagoons, and forest interiors. Mauritius sits roughly 2,000 kilometres off the southeast coast of Africa, while Mayotte and Madagascar lie farther west, so the recipes cover a wide arc of ocean and several distinct island kitchens.

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In 1944, nine-year-old Raj lives on Mauritius, a small island in the Indian Ocean, far from the fighting of the Second World War. His family struggles to survive, and his father works as a guard at a prison camp. After a severe beating puts Raj in the camp hospital, he meets David, a boy his own age, one of a group of Jewish refugees.

David and his companions fled Nazi-occupied Europe for Palestine, were refused entry, and were sent on to indefinite detention on Mauritius. The friendship forms across a sharp divide: Raj knows little beyond his island, while David has already crossed continents under threat. When a powerful storm damages the camp, David escapes with Raj's help, and the boys hide from Raj's violent father before heading into the forest.

What begins as something close to adventure for Raj shifts as hunger, danger, and malaria close in. Nathacha Appanah sets the story against a documented episode: from 1940 to 1945, Jewish detainees were held at a camp in Beau Bassin, Mauritius, after being turned away from Palestine. The narration keeps to a child's limited, immediate understanding.

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Lindsey Collen's novel is set in Mauritius, an island nation shaped by overlapping Indian, African, and European cultural layers. At its center is Sita, an activist figure and a well-known presence in Mauritian society, who carries a buried secret about her own past. The story is narrated by a character called Iqbal the Umpire, whose voice draws on ancient myths, folk tales, and religious prophecy to frame events set in the 1980s.

Sita's attempt to recover suppressed memory forms the core of the book. Her fragmented recollections surface in painful stages as she tries to confront what happened to her. Collen connects Sita's personal experience to wider patterns of violation and colonial power, linking one woman's hidden history to the broader circumstances of a small postcolonial country still working through its own past.

The novel was banned in Mauritius when it was first published, partly because of its title's reference to a figure from Hindu epic tradition. According to the supplied record, it went on to win the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book in Africa. Collen's approach is structurally unconventional, filtering a contemporary story through layers of older narrative forms.

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